Planning the vegetable garden

It's been raining here for the last two days, which means it's the perfect time to start looking at my vegetable garden planner and determining what will fill the 12 raised beds I have in what I like to call the potager garden.

For the last two years, the potager hasn't been as productive as I would like. Historically, this would lead me to double down on everything, but I've decided to take the opposite approach. My goal is to simplify so I can focus more on growing a few things well rather than spreading myself thin. I'm scaling back both on how many varieties of vegetables I'll try to grow this year and how many plants of each I'll add to the garden.

Cutting back will also allow me to dedicate the four large beds on the corners of the garden to cut flowers—which means I'm already down to eight beds for vegetables. I'm excited about this change, though. I think the flowers will have a positive impact on the overall beauty of the garden, and they should boost the productivity since they'll draw a whole host of pollinators. Plus, while I don't miss running the flower farm, which was truly back-breaking work, I do miss having rows of beautiful flowers that are solely for cutting to brighten the house or a friend's day.

The garden in (nearly) full production two years ago

Cutting back will be a bit challenging, but it's a lot easier to plan a vegetable garden when you map out where you'll put everything. A garden layout provides great visual cues for what your garden can and can't accommodate. In previous years, I've used a garden plan that I had carefully measured out and drawn on graph paper, and then, in typical me fashion, I laminated it—because I'm a retired professor and need a good excuse to use my set of dry erase markers and because it seemed far easier than drawing the map every year. This year, I just inserted a table into Microsoft Word with the appropriate number of rows and columns that would translate into one square being equal to one foot. I did, perhaps, go overboard once again by shading the table, but really it's ridiculous to think I'll stop being me altogether, and now it will be easy for me to print out a fresh and aesthetically pleasing plan every year.

A map of your plot also gives you the opportunity to jot down planting information such as the necessary spacing between plants, so it can not only help you plan where everything will go but also serve as a handy set of instructions you can take out to the garden with you. For example, you can sow sugar snap peas directly in the soil 2" apart, whereas with tomatoes, it's best to space them 2' apart and start seeds indoors. That's information you can consolidate on your map. You can also include the dates you plan to plant out seedlings or press seeds into the soil.

The garden plan in action

In my garden, onions and garlic already claim two of the vegetable beds, and Centaurea (bachelor buttons) and Nigella (Love-in-a-Mist) have been quietly growing in one of the corner beds throughout the winter. I'm going to put 10 Dahlia tubers in one corner bed, and the other two beds will start with Gomphrena (globe amaranth), Ammi majus (Queen Anne's lace), Helichrysum (strawflower), Lathyrus odoratus (sweet peas), and Scabiosa (pincushion flower). I already know I have far too many plants of each variety to fit in the beds, but the map will help me sort out how many extras I have of each that I can cheerfully plant in the ornamental beds all around the house. And, once the hardy annuals start going over, I'll replace them with the hardy annuals like Zinnia and Cosmos.

The arches (in the weed-infested potager last year)

The map is also useful for working out your succession planting, which involves planning what you'll plant to take the place of an earlier season's crop. I usually start my green beans indoors so I can easily slide mature plants into the space left behind by the sugar snaps once they've gone over. I use cattle panels as arches over the central walkway for the climbing plants like peas, beans, cucumbers, and melons, and they allow me to really stretch my growing space. I can't recommend them highly enough. They add a beautiful structure to the garden, and in summer, when it's blazing hot, I can harvest beans hanging through the arch while I'm standing in shade. Your map will give you the ability to figure out what you'll tuck up against the cattle panel and what you can grow in the rest of the bed. And, if you go the Word table route, you can keep the copies of your planting plans, put dates on them, and use them to help you manage your crop rotation from season to season.

So I'm not telling you that you should draw out a plan for your planting this season (largely because "should" is the worst word in any language), but I am encouraging you to give it a try. And if you do, let me know how it goes for you!

Signs of spring

We've entered what I call the season of multiple costume changes here. In the morning, I put on warm pants and my winter coat to take the dogs for a walk. Shortly after we get home, I exchange the coat for a fleece pullover. An hour or two later, I'm in a long-sleeve shirt and lighter pants. Afternoon requires changing into shorts and a T-shirt, and by 7:00 pm, I'm back in warm pants and long sleeves. I can't sufficiently explain why this irritates me a bit. I think it has something to do with my aversion to being overly fussy and to the extra work of removing clothes from their appropriate storage place and quickly putting them back...and potentially taking them out again. It goes against my deepest desire to simplify.

But these frequent costume changes also signal our gradual shift toward longer and warmer days and all the wonderful opportunities they present, so I will weather them (pun intended) as best I can. We're seeing other signals of that shift around here—like the young mahogany leaves of the rose bushes popping out all around the property. Those leaves are another good visual reminder to finish the pruning jobs as soon as possible.

It's time to cut back the Buddleia (butterfly bushes), a task I remember first undertaking 20 years ago when I was developing a deep curiosity in gardening. I read somewhere that it was important to cut Buddleia down to 12" in early March, so I dutifully (and somehow without trepidation) went out and did just that. I had planted the shrubs in front of our deck landing the previous year, and they had performed well, but after that first deep pruning, they were outstanding. People driving past our house would often stop and ask what I did to make them so magnificent. I answered with deep uncertainty, "I pruned them hard in March?" With each passing year, however, I became more convinced that it was the only way to set them up for success. So this week, the Buddleia will go from their current height of 9' tall back to 12".

Eden after an unruly winter (The blue structure below now has two holes in the top because a tall man stood on top...and then fell through!)

Last week, I got to grips with the climbing Eden rose that grows just outside the pool gate and below the landing to my studio. It's such a vigorous grower that the annual prune requires a good hour to get it back into shape. I've attached most of its canes to a sizeable trellis we built onto the two support posts for the landing, and I've woven other canes through the balusters of the pool fence. Then there are a couple of unruly ones that I just allow to reach for the sky. At the end of a season, though, Eden is a sprawling, slightly raggedy mess.

Eden in all her glory last season

The reason for this careful tying and weaving in is simple: more blooms. Roses are interesting specimens. You see, they bloom just on their tips—well, they do if you just let them grow like a regular shrub. But if you force the canes horizontally (by tying them to a trellis or weaving them through a fence), a rose can't tell where the tip of the cane is exactly, so it sends up shoots all along the length of the cane and then blooms on the end of each. With the Eden rose, we really can create a wall of roses.

You can do this with shrub roses as well by simply tying a length of jute twine around the end of a long new cane and tying the other end of the twine to a peg and driving it into the ground. You can create lovely arcs with the canes if you're careful. You don't want to be rough with them during the process or put them under too much pressure, though. They'll crimp if you do. But with the right coaxing, they'll take to their new position well.

The final structure

To get Eden in shape this year, I removed anything dead, dying, rubbing against another branch, extending well beyond the end of the trellis, or just too challenging to tie in (sometimes there are too many canes in one area, and they would limit the airflow). There was a lot of new growth that I had to manage, and to do that in some places, I had to cut last year's twine to release a cane and tie it lower on the trellis so that a new cane could take its place higher up.

What we now have is a much more uniform coverage of the trellis, so I believe we'll get an even more impressive display. There's also a wonderful cane shooting up to the studio steps, so I'll be tying its branches in along the stringers. I can already see myself in the coming months walking up the steps with roses just below my feet—and what could be better than that?

Pruning season in full swing

I'm not sure I'll ever get a good handle on time. Sometimes, it seems to be dragging along at a snail's pace, and other times, the days go by so quickly that I worry I've missed one or two. And so it is with the garden—in January, I'm sowing seeds in the laundry room every day and feeling so ahead of the game, and by late February, I'm panicking that I won't get everything done before the growing season takes off. The task that's consuming me these days is pruning countless plants before the first (or maybe second) week of March.

I've gotten through all of the Clematis group 3 pruning, but now I'm fretting over the group 2 vines and a whole host of other things. I mentioned that I have 12 Clematis vines on the property, but I haven't yet confessed to 12 climbing and shrub roses (and I don't count the two bushes that were here when we moved in). They're really starting to put on new shoots, so I'll have to pull on my gauntlets and get those taken care of this week.

A few of the countless buds on the Methley plum

But first, the fruit trees need my attention. I noticed yesterday that the plum trees are now covered in flower buds, so getting them back in shape took first priority this morning. Luckily, I took a lot off of them last year to get them into the prescribed goblet shape, so the work this morning only took about 15 minutes. For some reason, I always dread pruning the plum trees, which is a bit ridiculous because it's such wonderfully meditative work—I just forget year after year how happy it makes me.

Two flowers have already opened

This morning, I felt so peaceful working with the trees, following their branches and finding those that were damaged or rubbing and selecting where I needed to make a cut. It was an intimate time with two beautiful specimens, and the results are so satisfying. I've given them the attention they need to stay healthy, and they'll reward me in the coming weeks with beautiful blossoms and maybe—fingers crossed—a bumper crop of fruit. Want to learn about pruning plum trees? Check out this article.

I'll also be taking care of my group 2 Clematis vines this week, and I started this morning with 'Bourbon' because it always takes the "first to bloom" prize among the Clematis. I felt a little daunted by the task when I first stood in front of Bourbon to assess what I should do because she was a shaggy mess.

'Bourbon' before the cut

Group 2 vines require a careful approach, as they bloom on last year's growth. It's important to remove enough to provide good ventilation, but you don't want to cut so much that you end up losing a lot of blooms. It's a bit challenging to trace every stem there's a tangle of them, so I started by gently tugging at the thickest areas. This helped loosen a lot of the stems that had broken off but had been hung up among the others. I trimmed some stems down to the highest bud, and I lifted a section that had flopped over itself and carefully wove the stems through the fence. Finally, I found a lot of stems that had been scrambling across the ground, and I think I'll create a way to lift their heads off the ground but keep them low so I'll have an interesting display at the base of the plant. There may be some chicken wire sculpting ahead for me in the next few days.

Clematis 'Bourbon' breathing easy

I feel pretty good about what I accomplished with this one, and I'm looking forward to seeing that first shock of deep fuchsia that often peeks through the vine on the backside of the fence. That's the signal that Bourbon will soon provide a wall of flowers that will draw my attention every time I step outside the back door.

On to the roses...